The ability to determine whether a patient is asleep is useful in a variety of medical contexts. In some situations, the ability to determine whether a patient is asleep is used to diagnose conditions of the patient. For example, the amount of time that patients sleep, the extent of arousals during sleep, and the times of day that patients sleep have been used to diagnose sleep apnea. Such sleep information could also be used to diagnose psychological disorders, such as depression and mania.
In other situations, a determination as to whether a patient is asleep is used to control delivery of therapy to the patient. For example, neurostimulation or drug therapies can be suspended when the patient is asleep, or the intensity/dosage of the therapies can be reduced when a patient is asleep. As another example, the rate response settings of a cardiac pacemaker may be adjusted to less aggressive settings when the patient is asleep so that the patient's heart will not be paced at an inappropriately high rate during sleep. In these examples, therapy may be suspended or adjusted when the patient is asleep to avoid patient discomfort, or to conserve a battery and/or contents of a fluid reservoir of an implantable medical device when the therapy may be unneeded or ineffective. However, in other cases, a therapy intended to be delivered when the patient is asleep, such as therapy intended to prevent or treat sleep apnea, is delivered based on a determination that the patient is asleep.
Existing techniques for determining whether a patient is asleep include monitoring the electroencephalogram (EEG) of the patient to identify brain wave activity indicative of sleep. However, EEG monitoring typically requires that an array of electrodes be placed on a patient's scalp and coupled to an external monitoring device, and is most often performed in a clinic setting. Generally, an implantable medical device may only be used to monitor a patient's EEG in the rare cases when it is coupled to electrodes implanted within the brain of the patient. Consequently, existing EEG monitoring techniques are generally unsuitable for determining whether a patient is asleep in order to control therapy, or for long-term monitoring of the patient's sleep/wake cycle.
Existing techniques employed by implantable medical devices to determine whether a patient is asleep include monitoring the patient's respiration rate, respiration rate variability, and activity level. Each of these physiological parameters may be an inaccurate indicator of whether a patient is asleep. For example, from the perspective of these physiological parameters, it may appear that a patient is sleeping when, instead, the patient is merely lying down in a relaxed state. As another example, respiration rate and respiration rate variability, for example, may fail to accurately indicate that the patient is asleep when the patient suffers from a breathing disorder, such as Cheyne-Stokes syndrome.